In My Father's Shadow (21 page)

He treated me to the infectious sound of his laughter. Then, wiping his eyes with one edge of his napkin, “Didn’t we agree on ‘Father’ years ago? It’s what I called
my
father, you know.”

“Do you know what Mother and Jackie did after telling me there was no money to send me to college and I had to support myself? At seventeen!”

“Christopher, you must get rid of your anger at them. It’s a terrible poison that’s eating away at you …”

“They moved into a larger house and built a swimming pool!”

My father considered this information for a moment, while munching delicately on what was left of his salad, then taking a sip of his sparkling mineral water. He looked me in the eyes with a complicit smile. “I was also screwed by my guardian, you know, dear old Dadda Bernstein. He stole most of my inheritance. Did you know that?” I glumly shook my head. “The grownups we love and trust when we are young are so rarely what we want them to be.” He paused to light a cigar, chewing and puffing on the end of it, then blowing out a cloud of noxious smoke before he rumbled on. “What you’re not taking into account is that your fate rested in the hands of an upper-class English gent. Jack Pringle was acting on his notions of what’s proper for a young lady in upper-class English society, don’t you see? From his point of view — and you must always try to see the
other
person’s point of view, Christopher, no matter how intensely you despise it — finishing school was exactly the right place to send you before marrying you off to some English earl. If Jackie’d
had his way, you’d be living in a run-down castle somewhere in Surrey and riding to hounds every morning.” He was off again, laughing uproariously, and this time I joined him.

“But why a secretary, Father? You know, when I finally broke into publishing and became an editor with Encyclopaedia Britannica, Jackie was still going on about how he wanted me to take a secretarial job with a friend of his so I’d meet all the ‘right people.’ He and Mother didn’t seem to realize I’d made it into a profession in spite of them and without a college degree.”

“You just answered your own question, Christopher. Jackie wanted you to hobnob with all the ‘right people’ instead of those undesirable, long-haired types at Encyclopaedia Britannica. Don’t you see? Nothing was more important to Jackie than meeting the ‘right people.’ He was boxed in by his ideas of class and the life of privilege he’d always led.”

“You mean the work itself was unimportant …”

“Of course it was. Offices all over the United Kingdom are stuffed with the daughters of English lords who can’t type or take shorthand worth a damn, but they look pretty sitting at their desks and filing their nails. They have that unmistakable air of class, which simply means they feel superior to everyone else. When they answer the phone, they sound like this.” And he launched into a perfect imitation of a falsetto, upper-class British accent that had the desired effect of making me laugh—and while I was laughing, my anger began to ebb away.

I
N THE SUMMER
of 1953, before leaving Johannesburg to enroll in Pensionnat Florissant, I wrote my grandmother in Chicago: “You must have heard the wonderful news about my future career in Switzerland. I am so thrilled I feel like broadcasting it on the radio. Mummy and I are shopping lunatics, and I don’t think anyone was ever fitted out more smartly than me. Mummy says she will write soon, but now she is on her knees all day lining a coat for me for Switzerland.” (In fact, my mother sewed most of my clothes, using patterns for women twice my age and choosing fabrics in dull, somber colors. At the time I was unaware of how dowdy I looked in my homemade clothes.) After telling my grandmother there were only forty or fifty students at Florissant, I quoted from the school’s brochure: “Our aim is to develop the intellectual, moral, and physical qualities of the young girls confided to us, to direct them in their studies of French and modern languages, to initiate them in their future part of mistress of the house, complete their general
knowledge, in one word prepare them for life.” I ended my letter, “We are taken to all the concerts, art galleries, and plays, and for the winter holidays the whole school is moved up to chalets on the mountains which sounds divine. All lessons, everything is held in French but at first I will room with an English-speaking girl (thank heaven) so I will understand something somewhere sometime.”

I did not tell Grandmother how wrenching it would be to be parted from Barbara Epstein. Barbara and I promised to write each other long letters every week, leaving nothing out, and faithfully scribbling our motto on the back of every envelope — “To hell with the people and the weather”—which at our age we found hilarious.

Nor did I mention my first serious boyfriend, Alain de Courseulles, who had moved with his family into the house next door to ours. His father was an important French banker and his mother a vivacious Italian beauty. Alain was a mixture of the two, a handsome, dark-haired boy with arresting blue eyes. He had beautiful manners, a gentle nature, and was remarkably self-possessed for a boy of sixteen.

After a farewell dinner with his parents and two sisters, Alain had walked me home through the purple African dusk. When we reached my door, he told me in French that he loved me and gave me my first, tremulous kiss. We would have been wretched, clinging to each other in the doorway, had we not known that Alain and his family were being transferred to Paris. His mother had already arranged with mine that I would travel by train from Lausanne and stay with the de Courseulles during my school holidays.

P
ENSIONNAT
F
LORISSANT WAS
situated at the edge of Lausanne in Ouchy, a residential area that ran parallel to Lac Léman, as the French-speaking Swiss call Lake Geneva. Prosperous and law-abiding, Ouchy did not deserve the drama of the shimmering lake surrounded by snow-capped mountains disappearing into the clouds. Its immaculate homes and gardens wore the self-satisfied air I would come to associate with the Swiss. When I went for solitary walks after classes, I was tempted to shout at the top of my lungs, and once, to the horror of a woman weeding her garden, I did. Otherwise, each day melted into the next, and the only excitement was a stray dog baying at the moon.

Although I was moved by the grandeur of the lake and the Alpine peaks sparkling in the sun, I needed more in my young life than spectacular scenery.
Why, when I had wanted so much to go to college, had I been sent to this ridiculous school? Whether German, English, Italian, or Spanish—and each nationality quickly formed its own clique—the girls at Florissant were all the same: excessively rich and spoiled with nothing on their minds but washing their hair, painting their toenails, and meeting boys. They were here not to learn shorthand, typing, or any means of supporting themselves but to acquire a smattering of French and social polish before returning to lives of wealth and privilege.

So it was a happy day for me when Marian Strauss arrived at the pensionnat. Marian was the daughter of wealthy German Jews who had fled the Holocaust and resettled in England. What drew me to her at once was her humor and wicked, uninhibited laugh, but at sixteen, Marian was already mature and possessed an unlimited store of common sense. Here was a friend on whom I could rely in all weathers and seasons, and although we didn’t know it yet, we would remain friends for life.

What we did discover within days of meeting was our shared love of classical music. Soon we were playing duets on the upright piano in the dining hall when it was empty. Now I had a willing companion when we were taken to concerts in town.

Marian and I became inseparable. After lessons and homework, in the cool of the day, we would walk downhill through Florissant’s tidy gardens and slip through the gate that brought us to the Quai d’Ouchy, the tree-lined lakeside promenade that led to a small harbor, bobbing with private yachts.

On balmy days we walked bare-legged and in swishing skirts, hoping to attract the stares of lone males lounging on benches or lingering over espressos at an outdoor café. Although in my heart I believed I would always be faithful to Alain, I wasn’t averse to a whistle or two from any man in the vicinity and neither was Marian. We pretended not to notice, of course, tossing our hair, giggling, safe in our virginity.

I
HAD THOUGHT
I would be spending Christmas with Alain and his family in Paris when, with no warning, my father reappeared in my life. “After a good deal of excited telegramming and telephoning, Daddy arrived in Lausanne,” I wrote my grandparents. “How wonderful it was seeing this dear father of mine again, after three years. He couldn’t believe the change he saw in me …” (Actually, it had been two years, not three, since I had last been with my father.)

The arrival of the world-famous Orson Welles caused great excitement in our school. At thirty-eight, he was extremely handsome, tall and imposing, his dark hair slicked back, a man who might be described as heavyset but who was far from the gigantic proportions of his later years. From the moment he strode through the front door and stood towering in the lobby, girls were racing up and down the staircase or hanging over the banisters to get a good look at him. The boldest sidled up to him to beg for his autograph before Madame Favre, our elderly headmistress, shooed them away. Normally an elegant woman in complete control of herself, Madame looked as though she had flung on her clothes backward and forgotten to comb her frizzy white hair. A red spot appeared on each of her sunken cheeks as she ushered “Meester Velless” into the lounge reserved for visitors and asked him to wait there for “Christophare.” No need; I was already bounding into the room behind her.

“My God!” he exclaimed, holding me at arm’s length while he studied me with a mixture of wonder and delight. “How you’ve grown up . . . and how beautiful you’ve become!” There was something disquieting about the way he was staring at me. It was as though we both realized at the same moment that I was now too old to nestle in his lap. Meanwhile, Madame Favre was backing out of the room, as though leaving the presence of royalty. After she had closed the door, my father asked, his eyes sparkling, “Christophare, how would you like to spend Christmas in Paris with Meester Velless?”

“Oh, I’d love it!”

“Then that’s exactly what we’re going to do.” And he grinned at me—his irresistible, boyish grin—as though we were two runaway kids about to hop a freight train to Paris. He was Daddy again, the Daddy of Rome, London, and Saint Moritz. “Then go and pack your things, darling girl. And make it snappy! This place gives me the creeps.”

That Christmas vacation with my father in Paris was unlike any time I had spent with him before. There was no urgent work to occupy him, no secretary to whisk me away. I had my father to myself, day after day. At fifteen, I was now old enough to fully appreciate his wit and his brilliant mind. He, in turn, behaved as though being with me was a constant delight and revelation.

The details of what we did in Paris are recorded in a letter I wrote my grandparents after my return to Florissant in January of 1954.

We went to the Louvre, the ballet, the opera, the theatre. We climbed the Eiffel Tower and went to visit Napoleon’s tomb and
Versailles. We had lunch at La Tour d’Argent, one of the top restaurants in Paris, and walked for hours by the Seine. We visited the planetarium and heard a very interesting lecture which I had to translate for Daddy (not that I understood much myself!). We saw an exhibition of all the paintings from the museum in São Paulo, Brazil. Most of all we talked
AND
we talked.… I was so happy and I feel as I always do after being with Daddy—completely changed: more confident of myself and everyone around me and happier to be alive.

What a transforming effect he had on me in those days, my charismatic father!

The man I still called Daddy was impressed that in a mere six months I had learned enough French to translate a lecture at the planetarium. “And your accent is so perfect, people think you’re French, maybe not from Paris, but somewhere in the provinces.” He laughed his life-loving laugh. “But then I remember, Christopher, how quickly you learned Italian when you were a child living in Rome. You are obviously more adept than your father at picking up foreign languages, but that marvelous ear of yours — for languages, music, and doing wicked imitations of your betters—
that
you get from me!” And he laughed triumphantly.

One afternoon while we were strolling along a boulevard on the Left Bank, my father spotted Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall having lunch in a café. He took me inside to introduce me, and what mattered was not my brief but friendly meeting with two of Hollywood’s icons, but the unmistakable pride in my father’s voice: “This is my daughter, Christopher. My eldest. My firstborn.”

Yet along with boosting my self-confidence, my father poked gentle fun at some of my ideas. “Why are you so set on going to college?” he asked while we were having lunch one day at La Tour d’Argent. “Your mother never went to college and neither did I. Only bores and mediocrities go to college,” he said with a chuckle. “Seriously, Christopher, the fastest way to ruin an original mind is to imprison it for four years in an institution of higher learning. When I was your age, you know, I was so determined
not
to go to college that I fled to Ireland, hired a donkey cart and traveled all over the country, painting and sketching. And you know what I learned that summer? I wasn’t the great artist I’d thought I was.” He laughed at his younger self. “Don’t you
see, Christopher, I might have wasted
years
at art school if I hadn’t gone to Ireland. What I’m trying to tell you is that travel is the best education. Travel and living in foreign countries. And you’ve had plenty of that.”

Daddy doesn’t want to send me to college either
, I thought. But I was wrong.

A
FTER THOSE TEN
whirlwind days with my father in Paris, I became a lot more interested in men. Alain, barely a year older than I, seemed a mere boy to me now. Our intimate moments together had never progressed beyond the exchange of chaste kisses. I was beginning to dream of an older and more experienced lover, like the ones I was reading about in the erotic French novels I bought on the sly in a used bookstore in Lausanne.